Rock Band 4 PC fails to meet crowdfunding goal

Harmonix’ Rock Band 4 PC conversion has failed to meet its crowdfunding goal of $1.5 million on Fig. At the end of the campaign it managed to reach just 52% of its goal $792,817 from 1,674 backers.

The failure to meet the funding goal adds to the struggle of music games which recently re-emerged with poor sales leading to co-publisher Mad Catz and Harmonix to part ways and poor financials for Mad Catz themselves. Activision’s own Guitar Hero Live also faired poorly and lead to some layoffs at FreeStyle Games.

Harmonix has released an updated response to the campaign pages about the missed target and how the plan to proceed, if at all with a Rock Band 4 PC version. The reason the funding failed to reach targets appears to have been that

there doesn’t seem to be enough of an audience to make Rock Band for PC a viable project for us right now. We’re committed to supporting and improving RB4 on consoles. To be clear, we raised nearly $800,000 via backers and investors; it’s an impressive showing of support from our community and for our brand. But as an independent developer we have to be careful about how much money and development time we risk on a project we’re not sure has a big enough audience, and crowdfunding allowed us to (among other things)* judge the market fit for Rock Band PC.

It doesn’t mean that Rock Band PC is dead and buried, there could still be hope in the future for those wanting their music rhythm games on PC.

Will Rock Band PC be developed anyway?

It’s certainly in the realm of possibility that we might try again in the future, or find another path to get Rock Band for PC made. We love the PC as a platform, and we’re excited by the possibilities and freedom it allows for User Generated Content, but right now we don’t have any specific plans to make it happen.

Can you just bring RBN back?

No. Steam Workshop offered us a lot of infrastructure to make a new RBN possible. Without those systems RBN represents too much work for our console team right now, who already has a long list of priority features. We may revisit the idea in the future.